"A lot of people has been asking me about some performance comparison for the vector graphics framework we have. Rendering polygons, especially when we're dealing with stroke, tends to be the most expensive rendering operation performed in vector graphics. I constructed a little test, which tests raw polygon rendering power of Qt and Cairo. For the test I used the latest Qt main branch, and the master branch from Cairo's Git repository."

Let me just save you some time here by spelling it all out. As of right now Arthur crushes Cairo in performance, because Zach has been performance tunning the code like a beast.

The Cairo developers are aware of the performance gaps and they're working on it. When the official releases are completed, the difference in performance will decline, but don't expect the numbers to change for a while. The qt 4.3 branch is shaping up to be very impressive, because as you can see from Zachs blog, he's focussing on filling as many gaps as possible in QT's graphic classes. The svg code and test cases he's published show the true power of his work, and if your a developer and you like eye candy he's given you the power to very easily apear to be a graphical genious.